Law Commons^™

Turning Sanctions Into Reparations: Lessons For Russia/Ukraine, Evan J. Criddle

Faculty Publications

Within the past year, members of Congress have introduced nearly a dozen bills to make Russia pay for its military aggression against Ukraine. This Essay argues that none of the bills are satisfactory because they would either violate international law or fail to deliver meaningful compensation to Ukraine. Instead, the Essay urges policymakers to use economic sanctions as leverage to compel Russia to make reparations through an international claims-settlement process.

Sanctions And Consequences: Third-State Impacts And The Development Of International Law In The Shadow Of Unilateral Sanctions On Russia, Avidan Cover

Faculty Publications

In response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, NATO member states and their allies have imposed “unprecedented,” unilateral economic sanctions to hold Russia accountable, degrade its military capability, and limit its international financial access.1 From the outset, sanctioning states such as the United States have stated that they “designed these sanctions to maximize the long-term impact on Russia and to minimize the impact on [themselves and their] allies.”2 These sanctions on an economic power like Russia “have global economic effects far greater than anything seen before.”3 And there is concern that the unintended consequences of the sanctions will disproportionately harm developing …

How Private Actors Are Impacting U.S. Economic Sanctions, Maryam Jamshidi

Publications

Economic and trade sanctions are typically understood as the exclusive province of governments and intergovernmental organizations. Private parties have, however, long played a role in sanctions regimes. For example, private plaintiffs holding unsatisfied, terrorism-related civil judgments have used various U.S. federal statutes to enforce those judgments against assets blocked by U.S. sanctions. Most recently, plaintiffs with judgments against the Taliban have used some of those federal laws to execute against the financial assets of Afghanistan’s central bank. These and other efforts to enforce terrorism-related civil judgments are more than just attempts to collect on outstanding damages awards. Rather, they allow …

Retooling Sanctions: China’S Challenge To The Liberal International Order, Timothy Webster

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Tom Ginsburg has produced yet another classic of transnational law, political science, and international relations. Democracies and International Law yields important insights into the democratic nature of international law but cautions that authoritarian states can apply these very legal technologies for repressive or anti-democratic purposes. Building on Ginsburg’s theories of mimicry and repurposing, this contribution highlights the role of both techniques in the creation of China’s economic sanctions program. On the one hand, China has developed a basic set of tools to impose economic sanctions—a key instrument in the liberal international toolkit—on foreign entities and persons. In so doing, …

Sanctions And The Blurred Boundaries Of International Economic Law, Perry Bechky

Faculty Articles

Economic sanctions are often said to occupy a middle space between communiqués and combat. As this description makes clear, sanctions are a political tool – but a political tool that operates through economic regulation. They are simultaneously economic and political. Their dual nature seems to place sanctions in a twilight zone, neither truly in nor out of the academic discipline of international economic law (“IEL”). Sanctions tend to be marginalized in IEL scholarship, generally taking little space in the IEL literature and at the podiums of IEL conferences and courses. While economic sanctions loom large today in headline news and …

Race And The New Policing, Jeffrey Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

Several observers credit nearly 25 years of declining crime rates to the “New Policing” and its emphasis on advanced statistical metrics, new forms of organizational accountability, and aggressive tactical enforcement of minor crimes. This model has been adopted in large and small cities, and has been institutionalized in everyday police-citizen interactions, especially among residents of poorer, often minority, and higher crime areas. Citizens exposed to these regimes have frequent contact with police through investigative stops, arrests for minor misdemeanors, and non-custody citations or summons for code violations or vehicle infractions. Two case studies show surprising and troubling similarities in the …

Improving Economic Sanctions In The States, Jessica M. Eaglin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Export Controls: A Contemporary History, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

Provides highlights of my recently published book Export Controls: A Contemporary History. Describes the roles played by multiple U.S. Government agencies and congressional oversight committees in this policymaking arena including the Commerce, Defense, State, and Treasury Departments. It also reviews the roles played by international government organizations such as the Missile Technology Control Regime, export oriented businesses, and research intensive universities.

Overview And Operation Of U.S. Financial Sanctions, Including The Example Of Iran, Barry E. Carter, Ryan Farha

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Financial sanctions are increasingly being used in the mix of international economic sanctions being employed by the United Nations, regional entities, and individual countries, including the United States. These financial sanctions have become more focused and effective as the tools and techniques have improved significantly for tracing and identifying the financial transactions of terrorists, weapons proliferators, human rights violators, drug cartels, and others. These sanctions can not only freeze financial assets and prohibit or limit financial transactions, but they also impede trade by making it difficult to pay for the export or import of goods and services.

In spite of …

Eu Law, International Law And Economic Sanctions Against Terrorism: The Judiciary In Distress?, P. Takis Tridimas

Journal Articles

This article seeks to examine the relationship between European Union law, international law, and the protection of fundamental rights in the light of recent case law of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and the Court of First Instance (CFI) relating to economic sanctions against individuals. On 3 September 2008, the ECJ delivered its long-awaited judgment in Kadi and Al Barakaat on appeal from the CFI. In its judgment under appeal, the CFI had held that the European Community (EC) is competent to adopt regulations imposing economic sanctions against private organizations in pursuance of UN Security Council (UNSC) Resolutions seeking …

Economic Sanctions Against Human Rights Violations, Buhm Suk Baek

Cornell Law School Inter-University Graduate Student Conference Papers

The idea of human rights protection, historically, has been considered as a domestic matter, to be realized by individual states within their domestic law and national institutions. The protection and promotion of human rights, however, have become one of the most important issues for the international community as a whole. Yet, with time, it has become increasingly difficult for the international community to address human rights problems collectively. Despite a significant development in the human rights norms, effective protection of fundamental human rights and their legal enforcement has a long way to go.

This paper will argue that economic sanctions …

S. 970, The Iran Counter-Proliferation Act Of 2007, Orde F. Kittrie

Congressional Testimony

No abstract provided.

The United States As Global Sheriff: Using Unilateral Sanctions To Combat Human Trafficking, Janie Chuang

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

In recent years, the issue of human trafficking - the recruitment or movement of persons by means of coercion or deception into exploitative labor or slavery-like practices - has moved from the margins to the mainstream political agenda. The rapid proliferation of international, regional and domestic anti-trafficking laws bespeaks universal condemnation of the practice, but belies deep divisions among States over how to define and approach the problem. It is thus significant that the international community was able to reach consensus and conclude a new international law on trafficking - the Palermo Protocol. But just weeks before the signing of …

Alternatives To Economic Sanctions, Christine M. Chinkin

Book Chapters

Considering the merits of non-coercive alternatives to economic sanctions inevitably risks the charges of idealism and naIvete. However a number of speakers in this conference have raised considerable doubts about the efficacy of sanctions: even on their own terms sanctions rarely work and the material costs to non-targeted states and the implications for human rights make their justification problematic, even when they can in some sense be said to have worked. It therefore makes sense at least to give consideration to some non- coercive alternatives, either in conjunction with sanctioning policies or separate from them. The other alternative is the …

The Effectiveness Of International Legislative Responses To The Helms-Burton Act, Bernadette Atuahene

All Faculty Scholarship

The Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (Libertad) Act (Helms-Burton Act) is the latest appendage to the Cuban embargo. Title III has caused an international uproar because it gives U.S. victims of Cuban expropriation a right of action within U.S. courts against third parties who traffic in confiscated property. For example, a U.S. citizen can sue a Canadian Mining company doing business in Cuba if they are operating on or using expropriated property. The Helms-Burton Act (HBA) targets U.S. allies who continue to trade and invest in Cuba regardless of pending U.S. claims of expropriation. In response to the HBA, Cuba, …

Agony Of The Innocents, Feisal Amin Istrabadi

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The Issue Of The Legal Validity Of Using Economic Sanctions To Enforce Human Rights, Thomas Hailu

LLM Theses and Essays

The international legal regime as it pertains to human rights is neither as established nor as definitive as it appears. It suffers from many disadvantages, the first and most important of which is the fact that the international legal regime has never been capable of effectively enforcing its rules or instituting appropriate remedies for its breaches. Some states have attempted to make up for this inability on behalf of international law by undertaking an enforcement mechanism either unilaterally or multilaterally; economic sanctions are often regarded as valuable tools of enforcement to be used against countries which are allegedly engaged in …

The Constitutional Responsibility Of Congress For Military Engagements, Lori Fisler Damrosch

Faculty Scholarship

The U.S.-led military operation in Haiti has unfolded with minimal violence and few casualties so far. That factual proposition – which is necessarily subject to revision – has important ramifications under both U.S. constitutional law and international law. On the constitutional level, the avoidance of hostilities defused what was poised to become a serious confrontation between the President and the Congress. On the international level, doubts in some quarters about the legitimacy of a forcible intervention, although not entirely allayed, were somewhat quieted with the achievement of a negotiated solution, which enabled U.S. troops to bring about the return to …